Starr Sign

by C. S. O'Cinneide

“What about this Aunt Stacey?” I say. “Maybe she’ll show up.”

  “Even if she does, she’s not legally in a position to take care of the child,” Malone says. “Honestly, I don’t even understand how she was able to get across the border with her.”

  The Canadian border used to be a joke to cross before 9/11. When I was young, Uncle Rod and Dad used to drive to a back road straddling the U.S.-Canada border and hike into a hunting cabin in Ontario so we could go fishing there. Nowadays, if you try to drive on that road, you’ll have a Homeland Security helicopter following your ass in under a minute.

  “Come on, Malone. That kid wouldn’t last a day in a group home. She couldn’t take care of herself. She’s not, you know …”

  “Like you?” Malone says.

  I think about the big eyes and the shadow tear. She may have some attitude on her, but I can tell my sister has lived a charmed life up there in Canada compared to me. And the truth is, I hadn’t even lasted a full twenty-four hours under the care of the state. I make a quick decision. One that I’m sure I’m going to regret.

  “I’ll take her,” I say.

  “Oh, come on, Candace.”

  “No, seriously. I’m a family member, a blood relative. You’ve got the fucking DNA to prove it.”

  “What do you know about taking care of a young girl?”

  “I’m not stupid, Malone. I’m not going to drop her on her head or take her to a peeler bar or something and leave her in the coat check. I am capable of being responsible for another human being.” But even as I say this, I’m not so sure that I am.

  “I don’t know whether it’s a good idea, Candace.”

  “I don’t see where you have a choice.”

  “I do have a choice. I’m police, Candace. The girl is officially in my care.”

  “Then do it as a favour to me,” I say. “As a friend.” I’m playing the friendship card. Not something I’m in the habit of doing. And Malone knows it.

  “I don’t know, Candace.”

  “I do,” Janet says. Malone and I turn around to see her standing in the open doorway. “I want to go with Candace.”

  “See?” I say, looking back at Malone. “She’s made her choice.”

  I go to stand with my new half-sister.

  “And she’s choosing me.”

  When I come back from the restroom at Denny’s, Janet is dipping the French fries she ordered in a combination of ketchup and mayonnaise. I remember hearing that makes you either artistic or a psychopath. Looking at what the kid is working on in the sketchbook she has out on the table, I’m wondering if it’s both.

  “That’s, um, disturbing,” I say, sitting down in the booth. She’s got talent, I’ll give her that. The drawing she’s outlining with a collection of dark coloured pencils has a dilapidated haunted house in the background. Standing on the path to it is a young girl wearing a cloak, her mouth wide open. She looks like a cross between Little Red Riding Hood and the ghoul in Edvard Munch’s Scream.

  “I copied it,” Janet says, still concentrating on getting the shrieking mouth of the girl in the picture just right. “It’s from a graphic horror novel.”

  “Nice,” I say, opening my flask and pouring some of the hooch I picked up on the way into a cup of black coffee.

  “I want to be a writer,” Janet says, reaching for another French fry off the plate. “And an illustrator, obviously.”

  Before starting on the fries, she’d polished off the Christmas turkey special, complete with congealed gravy and stuffing. The turkey special is just one of the sad festive offerings available at the restaurant. A Santa doll with a dirty white beard peers over the waitress station. Above my head, a shaggy silver garland droops down worse than a past-it peeler’s tits.

  “Well, don’t quit your day job,” I tell her. “There’s no money in writing.”

  “It’s not about the money,” Janet says. “It’s about art.”

  “It’s about living in subsidized housing and having to sell a vital organ to pay the rent.”

  “You sound like my guidance counsellor,” Janet says with a sigh. “He wants me to do the advanced STEM program when I go to high school.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Engineering and crap like that. I won the science fair, and I’m good in math.”

  “That’s got more coin in it than horror books,” I say. Unless you’re Stephen King, I guess. But when they made that whacked wordsmith, they broke the mould.

  Janet closes the sketchbook and slips it back into the shoulder bag she has with her. On the flap it says, I love Oxford. Except the “love” is a big red heart. I wonder where she got it. I don’t see a kid making trips over to England on a dead dad’s nurse’s pension. But she tells me she got it in a thrift store along with the bowling team–style top she’s wearing.

  “Why do you think Mom’s blood was on that lady’s shirt?”

  “I have no fucking idea,” I say, taking a large gulp of my spiked java. The old biddy at the next table gives me a disapproving look. Maybe I should cool it with the f-bombs around the kid. But that’d be hard. My language matches my life, and neither would be rated PG-13.

  Janet shifts uncomfortably in a big puffy coat that dwarfs her Kate Moss frame. It makes Deep’s Canada Goose parka look like a spring jacket. She’s unzipped it but hasn’t taken it off since we left the morgue.

  “Maybe they made a mistake,” she suggests. “With the DNA.”

  “I may not have won the science fair, but I don’t think they make too many mistakes about that sort of thing.”

  “Yes, they do,” Janet pipes up, bristling in her colossal coat. “I read about a case in Europe where they were looking for years for this serial killer called the Phantom. It turned out the DNA found at all the murder scenes actually belonged to a woman working in a cotton swab factory. She hadn’t used latex gloves when she was packing the boxes they used for forensic collection.”

  “Was she the killer?” I ask.

  “No, she just contaminated the swabs,” Janet says, sighing like I’m an idiot, or an adult, which I suppose is the same thing to a thirteen-year-old girl.

  “Did Angela have a job sorting Q-tips?” I ask her.

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t think that’s much of a possibility then.”

  “I’m just saying, they make mistakes,” Janet says, furiously dipping another French fry into the mayonnaise-ketchup mix.

  I am starting to think it was a mistake to have taken this girl with me, to have insisted to Malone that it was a good idea. I don’t have any patience. And I am starting to recall that a person requires a lot of this particular virtue when dealing with this age group. The sooner they find Angela or that Stacey character, the better.

  “Where do you think she is?” I ask her. “Your mother.” I’m still having trouble with the our.

  Janet pushes a pale strand of hair behind one ear. I can’t get over the colour or the silky straight smoothness of it. My own long honey-brown mop springs out from my head like Medusa snakes on acid. I don’t know how we can be related.

  “I’m not sure where she is,” she finally says. “But I know where she was going.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  Janet bites her lip, pushes her big glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I didn’t want to tell the police,” she says. “I didn’t want to get her in trouble.”

  “I’m not the cops, Janet.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m about the furthest thing from the cops you’re going to get.”

  She raises an eyebrow at that. I see the faint hint of a grin.

  “So, where was she going?”

  She pushes the empty plate of fries away, puts her hands in the pockets of her jacket.

  “She said she was going to see her grandfather. In Detroit. She said he was sick.”

  I sense we both know who she means. But I say it, anyway. “The old Don?” Then in case she doesn’t get the terminology. “Her Scarpel
lo grandfather?”

  “Yes,” Janet says. “She’s not supposed to see them, her family. My dad always told me that. I thought maybe it was a condition of her release from Bellevue or something. But she went, anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Janet says.

  But I think both of us know. From what I’d been told about Angela, she’d never give up the opportunity for a payoff. Maybe she thought the old man would feel bad about the family ostracizing her all those years ago and leave her something in the will if she did the bedside vigil thing. Although I don’t know how she would expect sentimentality from the man who’d blown up her parents with a car bomb. The old Don had run the Scarpellos with tight reins right into his nineties, only loosening his grip when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer last year. He’d finally handed those reins to his grandson Alex, the progeny of his youngest son, skipping the generation before him, sort of like the Queen’s expected to do. Alex Scarpello is my mother’s cousin, even though he’s the same age as me.

  “Well,” I say, downing my coffee and waving for the cheque, “I’m sure she’ll be coming back soon.” But looking at the young yet clearly not stupid girl across the laminate table, I figure she’s got to be thinking the same thing as me.

  If our mother went into that lethal den of Sicilian vipers, she may not be coming back at all.

  CHAPTER 4

  WHEN JANET AND I MAKE IT BACK to the E-Zee Market, Majd, the owner, is using a power drill to fasten a wreath above a display of Slim Jims. His eight-year-old niece sits on a stool holding his toolbox.

  Majd is a Syrian refugee and the most excellent of landlords. He provides me with a constant supply of samosas and allows me to live virtually rent-free above his store in exchange for covering the cash when he goes to visit his mother on the other side of town.

  His niece, Rima, used to be a nephew. She’d insisted she was as a girl since she could talk. A bunch of behavioural issues followed, worse than me with the Tonka truck. When they’d allowed her to finally present as the gender she wanted, the behavioural issues stopped. I’d asked Majd once how his family reconciled this with their religious beliefs, not thinking being transgendered was strictly halal. He’d said he’d seen what men were capable of in this world, the violence, the war. “There’s no shame in a girl,” he had told me. And there isn’t. But not all men are brutal, nor all women blameless. I am the long-legged walking proof of that.

  “Hi, Majd,” I say when he’s finished with the wreath. He turns around and sees me with Janet, does a double take.

  “This is my friend,” I say, not knowing how best to explain the situation.

  “I’m her sister,” Janet says, not having the same problem with explanations.

  “I am pleased to meet you, Candace’s sister,” Majd says, eying her with curiosity, no doubt taking in the similar height and skin tone but perplexed by the Nordic hair. He looks back at me. “You didn’t tell me you had a sister,” he says.

  “It’s sort of a new thing,” I tell him.

  He nods without saying anything. Majd is cryptic at the best of times, having come from a country where loose lips can seriously shorten your life span. I notice he doesn’t mention that Malone came by looking for me. Either he wants to stay out of it, or he figures that since I’ve just shown up with a new sister in tow, I have enough on my plate. Rima doesn’t have the same history as her uncle to hold her back.

  “That lady was looking for you. The pretty one with the badge.”

  “Thanks, Rima,” I say to her. “Cool threads, by the way.” She’s wearing a sparkly, ruby-red peasant dress with hiking boots. A true lady always knows how to dress for the occasion.

  “Can I use the drill now, Uncle?” Rima asks, ignoring me now that she’s delivered her important message. She’s got a serious love of power tools for a kid who once begged the Tooth Fairy to take her penis away. But that had been a few years ago. These days she begged the tooth fairy for a fiver, just like everybody else.

  I leave Majd and his niece to their bonding moment over the cordless Dewalt and usher Janet up the back stairs to my apartment. It’s basically an oversized storage room with a three-piece bathroom and a hotplate. It also has a fridge. I open it and pull out a cold Budweiser for me and a bright orange Powerade for Janet. I have them for my workouts on the weight bench that’s shoved into one corner of the room. I like to keep myself in fighting form, mostly because I never know when I’m going to have to fight.

  Janet takes a seat cross-legged on the mattress on the floor, leaving the only chair at the small kitchen table to me. I sit down with my beer. I watch her unfold her legs and shuffle over a bit to avoid a rebel spring.

  “Do you like living here?” she asks me.

  “Would you like living here?” I ask her right back, taking a mighty swig of the crisp Bud.

  “I don’t know,” she says politely. Then exclaims, “Oh my God, you have a VCR?”

  This ancient bit of entertainment technology had been lifted from my Uncle Rod’s place before he went to prison. It sits across from my mattress next to an old TV that Majd gave me.

  Janet gets up off the couch and starts to look through the stack of VHS tapes.

  “Legally Blonde?” she asks me, holding one up in her hand.

  “I’ve got a thing for chick flicks,” I tell her. “Comes from growing up in a house full of men.” In addition to the aging librarian, my father and I’d also lived with a bookie named Rodney and a burly teamster who let me ride on his back strapped in my car booster seat. Even when my dad had his own place, my Uncle Rod was always around. Mike Starr never lived with a woman again after my mother left, though many had tried to get him to shack up. I guess once fucked over by the opposite sex, twice shy.

  Janet picks up a copy of Fried Green Tomatoes. That movie always turns on the waterworks for me, I’m not going to lie. “I know what you mean,” Janet says, studying the dusty cover.

  “How would you know what I mean?” I ask her. “You had Angela.” And I didn’t, I want to add. But I realize that’s not Janet’s fault. But I could have used a mother in those years to show me the ropes of becoming a woman. So I didn’t have to learn from the likes of Mean Girls and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Maybe with a different influence I wouldn’t have spent half my life as a cold-hearted killer. Although it’s hard to blame that on poor old Lindsay Lohan. That chick has enough to contend with.

  “My dad sort of raised me,” Janet says, leaving my video collection to sit back down on the mattress. “He worked the night shift, so he was home during the day.” She lies down and stares up at the fraying plaster ceiling. “Mom was okay when she was taking her meds, but she didn’t always.”

  “What happened when she didn’t?” I ask.

  “Oh, you know, the usual bipolar thing,” Janet says. One day she’d grab me and drive seven hours north to Sault Ste. Marie to go blueberry picking.” She rolls over on the bed and props herself up on one elbow to face me. “The next, she couldn’t get up off the couch.”

  “That sounds a bit rough,” I say. Maybe I was better off with Lindsay Lohan.

  “She was really good when she was well,” Janet says, getting defensive. “She used to take me tobogganing. She loved the snow. Even tried to ski with my dad and me once. But she was really bad at it. She’d keep losing one ski, and come down the hill on just the one, you know, like slalom. Falling and laughing her head off.”

  I am trying to think of all the nasty stories I heard about Angela from my father and Uncle Rod, and not in even one of them can I picture her skiing — or laughing, for that matter.

  “Then we’d all go for beaver tails,” Janet says. “They’re these big, round flat pastries, covered in sugar and chocolate.” This idyllic Canadian family ski trip scenario is starting to stick in my craw like a broken ski pole. But I don’t want to be a sore sibling.

  “That’s how I know there’s something going on with Mom,” Janet says. “When s
he’s away, she always messages me our code word, slalom, so I know she’s okay. She hasn’t sent me that message in over three weeks.” She starts tugging gently on her lower lip. I’m thinking we better change the subject here.

  “Tell me more about your dad,” I say.

  “He was great,” Janet says, releasing the lip.” Since he was home during the day, we played together a lot. We used to dress up in costumes and act out fairy tales and stuff. I’d always get to be the princess or whatever, and he’d be all the other parts.”

  I remember acting out similar one-acts with a mangy terrier we had for a while. But I tended toward pirate themes. The dog bit me one day when I tried to put an eye patch on him.

  “Is that who you got the hair from?” I ask. “Your dad?”

  “Yeah. Mom has hair like you, but darker,” she tells me. “Dad’s grandparents were from Denmark. They had a farm in Manitoba way back.”

  “Is that where his family is now?” I’m wondering if I can get some of this information faster than Malone can.

  “I don’t know. We always lived in Ontario, so my dad could work at the addiction centre in Guelph,” she says. “Dad didn’t talk about his family. They never came around. Mom said they didn’t like her.”

  What’s not to like about a crazed Italian girl fresh out of Bellevue? I’m thinking. But I have the sense not to let my wise-ass tendencies have a voice in this case.

  “When he got cancer, I thought they’d come,” she says. “But they didn’t. Then it was just Mom and me.”

  “When did he die?” I ask. “Your dad.”

  “When I was ten,” she says. The fairy tale games ended early for her. At least I had my father into adulthood. Although hearing your dad has washed up on the shore with a Mexican necktie isn’t easy news for a daughter to handle at any age.

  Janet gets out her sketchbook from the Oxford bag, flips over onto her stomach, and starts drawing like she did in the diner. This is a different picture. A woman claws at her throat with her eyes bugging out, her skin coming off in jagged strips.

  “Did you copy that from the graphic horror novel, too?” I ask the back of Janet’s head.